Publishing On-line

Talking Point II: Subject Participation

On-line work, unlike that found in most print journals, is potentially accessible to the subjects of our research. One co-author of this piece, for example, has found that a majority of the participants in his dissertation research frequently use the World Wide Web. He has placed preliminary comments about his research on a Web site he maintains and received numerous e-mailed responses that have impacted his theoretical and practical approach towards his topic. The author plans to post a draft version of the chapter that includes the results of his interviews with participants on-line where they can have a role in the final editing and conclusions of his dissertation. We use this example to illustrate our belief that electronic documents should play a significant role in tenure because of their ability to increase the validity and utility of our scholarship.

We speak of enhanced validity because our "human subjects" may challenge epistemic, methodological, and argumentative elements of our research. One might not expect a non-academic respondent to be concerned with the appropriateness of chi-square analysis in our findings. However, we celebrate the potential for "outsiders" to ask, "who are you to make such a statement about this phenomenon?" "How do you know?" They can also ask the most potentially damning of questions: "Who cares?" This last question illustrates the second element of scholarship that may be enhanced by on-line publishing: utility. What is the use of our research when the people about whom we write are unlikely to read it or judge its conclusions? We must stop hiding behind "trickle down scholarship" that assumes that our conclusions will eventually filter into the mainstream.

Our "talking point" of subject participation may be expanded into a discussion of the role of scholarly consumers of our products. Should not their voices be heard in the arbitration of tenure decisions? As Blair, Brown and Baxter (1994) noted in their germinal piece, quantity of publishing is apparently judged far more than quality in many decision making committees. Thus, the yardstick upon which a scholar might be based is the number of papers, articles, and books s/he has written. In the electronic realm, however, it is possible to measure the amount of citations that have been made of a given article, just as one might measure the amount of "hits" (or visits) a page might receive over a given period of time.

To be sure, this ability is impacted by the relative popularity of a site in which the article might be located--just as a print article is measured by the reputation of its journal. However, in terms of accessibility, one might argue that it is just as easy to retrieve an article in Irkutsk as it is in Iowa. At least, one might argue that such a transfer is easier in the electronic medium than it is in the print medium. Perhaps the tenure candidate might be asked to prepare a representative sample of on-line (and print) citations which would demonstrate the utility of his/her work to audiences that include (and might transcend) the academy.